


Dark Diamonds

by dawnstruck



Series: Role Reversal [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003), Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Dubious Consent, Gen, M/M, Role Reversal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-17 00:46:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5847370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawnstruck/pseuds/dawnstruck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just wait, he thinks to himself. Make the colonel crack his teeth on him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Diamonds

**Author's Note:**

> Third and last part of the Role Reversal AU. Go read the other two first or you'll be pretty much lost.

Edward's childhood is memories of hiding behind his mother's skirt and tagging after Al and Winry to make sure that they don't actually kill each other. It's his father's broad back in the doorway, and tearing up over scraped knees.

His childhood ends at his mother's grave.

He remembers burying his face in granny Pinako's shoulder, crying and crying till his face feels hot and the fabric of her grief-blackened dress is damp with his tears, while Al stands and clenches his fists and snarls how _flowers won't bring her back_.

Alchemy might, though.

Alchemy has always been his friend, has always come so easy to him. There are so many books in their father's study, so many obscure references to even obscurer sources. It's easy then to convince Al. Easier still to eradicate his own doubts.

 

Izumi is everything mom never was and Ed is grateful for it. She is hard and loud where mom was soft and quiet. She smacks him over the head whenever he gets a formula wrong while mom would only have smiled in fondness and blissful ignorance.

Izumi also looks at him and Al with a certain kind of distant affection, much like the one Ed feels for her. Like, I love you but you are not _mine_.

Sig is even worse, too much like father, too tall, too broad-shouldered, and even more tight-lipped than their old man. Difference is, though, Sig is there and cooks dinner and tucks them in and puts bandages on scraped knees. Sig is there and Hohenheim isn't.

But Ed does not settle into the domesticity, the safety. He can take the scrapes and bruises. He won't be staying here for long anyway.

 

Water, Carbon, Ammonia, Lime, Phosphorous, Salt, Saltpeter, Sulfur, Fluorine, Iron, Silicon. Trace elements. One drop of blood each.

The mantra has become so ingrained in Ed's brain that for a moment he cannot fathom why there is so much blood everywhere instead of just one drop.

Scrapes and bruises, he thinks when he has lost a leg and there is a gaping hole in his heart where Al used to be.

Take it, he screams himself hoarse, shaking fingers painting disaster onto what little is left of him. Take _me_ , because what else is there if it's not mom or Al. Death is better than loneliness, death is better than having to stare at that twisted creature in the corner with its limbs all akimbo and it ribs reaching heavenwards like it just crawled straight out of hell.

For a split second he had thought it to be mom and that, for some reason, seems like the greatest of all the sins he committed.

So he tries to atone for it and slams his palms onto the circle once more.

 

Stop crying, Al tells him, his voice an echo among hollowness, Stop crying, stop crying, it won't change anything, it won't-

But Al can't cry anymore so Ed cries for the both of them, cries himself to sleep when the morphine isn't enough to numb the pain, cries and dreams and begs for another chance.

It appears in the form of a stranger.

The man is a colonel, but it's less his uniform and rigid pose that prove he's military and more his fearlessness to address the elephant in the room, the giant armor, the half-devoured boy.

Mustang looks at Ed while even Winry had been avoiding doing the same, and his eyes are free of both pity and judgment.

If you're done crying over spilled milk, Mustang says, You know where to find me.

 

So Edward finds him.

He finds Colonel Mustang and the deepest secrets of the military, Nina Tucker painted in bloody streaks across the wall in a dirty dead end, he finds the living breathing ingredients of the red stone. He finds what it means to kill someone and to desperately fight for your life. He finds that war makes soldiers do terrible things to girls like Rosé.

He finds that not all men need war as an excuse.

 

“Fullmetal,” Mustang says like a blade trying to hit a chink in his armor, the one he is wearing whenever Al isn't there with him.

“Sir,” Edward says and stands up straight, gaze ahead.

Mustang never tells him to stand at ease in his presence, and even if he did Ed would never be able to obey.

There is that look in Mustang's eyes sometimes, shrouded and subdued, but Ed has caught sight of it too often to pretend it weren't there, weren't meant for him.

His eyes are like dark diamonds, glinting and sharply cut and the hardest of all things.

Ed cannot help but wonder whether his heart is the same.

 

“Don't just take it,” Mustang hisses as he beats him with hollow hands, “Fight back!”

Fight, like that isn't what Ed has been doing for the past ten years of his life. Fight, like his every day weren't a battle with himself.

But Ed is tired of fighting. Tired of breaking himself to pieces.

“Fullmetal,” Mustang growls warningly with a hand in Edward's hair, and there is something akin to desperation in his voice as though he were the one who couldn't help but plead for mercy.

The truth of that realization has a high of power surge through Ed, even as his nose crashes against unforgiving wood, blood on his lips.

Yet as long as Edward does not cry, Mustang would try to bite the tears out of him, lick them up with a greedy tongue.

But no. For once Edward refuses to cry. For once, he'd decide what unraveled him.

Just wait, he thinks to himself. Make the colonel crack his teeth on him.

 

Roy Mustang is a coward who hides behind his rank, his uniform, his desk, his affable smiles, his tightly controlled flames.

When he kisses Edward for the first time he has none of that.

Instead, they run into each other one late evening when it's already more dark than day, when they are both in civilian clothing and with no specific place to be.

Edward lifts his automail hand to salute, but before he can properly do so – spite instead of respect – Mustang has grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him into a side alley, rough red brick wall at his back. There is no light, though, and Ed has known too many shadows to not be afraid of them so for a moment he flounders, balls his fists into weapons.

But then Mustang's fingers are on his chin, followed by his lips on his mouth, and Ed remembers that this is static warfare. So he breathes harshly through his nose, closes his eyes and thinks of home.

 

Edward wears his uniform like a shield because it makes him blend in with the Amestris sea of blue and brass.

Mustang strips him, sufficiently, systematically, lays him bare like a miner's pickax in search for a vein of gold. Each encounter is an explosion, each touch like shrapnel digging deep into his skin.

Wounds like that can kill you, Ed knows. But it's not like he isn't already Fullmetal anyway.

He doesn't mind the pain so much as the tentative tenderness with which Mustang's fingertips sometimes shiver across his cheeks. Edward knows pain, is intimately familiar with it. He does not understand why sometimes, instead of yanking at his hair, Mustang just combs it out of his face and kisses his eyelids like a religious ritual.

 

It becomes some sort of open secret. Hawkeye seems to know. Alphonse sure as hell does. He had probably figured it out before Edward or Mustang themselves ever suspected any of it.

He is also the only one who refuses to turn a blind eye.

“I can never tell whether he wants to kill you or fuck you,” he says when Edward returns with a ring of bruises around his neck.

Both, Edward thinks, This time it was both.

The Colonel had fucked him, on his back and splayed across the surface of the desk in the office, and he had put his palm to Edward's throat until Ed thought he could see the Gate.

Afterwards, he had ordered Edward to pick up the papers and pencils which had fallen to the ground, had neatly arranged them back on the table, and blandly thanked Edward for his help. But his hands had been shaking and his voice, too, and for that one moment there was no doubt that in reality neither of them held any power over the situation.

Edward would have left with a spring in his step if it weren't for his limp.

 

It'd be so easy to claim that Mustang is blackmailing him, holding their secrets over him as leverage, but it's not quite so simple as that.

There is an abyss in Ed and Mustang doesn't seem to know whether he wants to tear it open or fill it with himself. In the end, he does both, parts Ed's lips, only to seal his mouth with his own, push their tongues against each other.

They are at a stalemate, not because of strategy but because they had looked at each other, knocked their knees underneath the table and upset the whole board. Their blacks and whites are mixed, their pieces lost somewhere on the floor. It's a nice floor, polished dark wood, and Edward's knees have gotten quite familiar with it over the course of the past weeks.

They don't only meet in the office nowadays or in abandoned alleyways but in Mustang's home, as though the curtains there might be enough to belatedly turn their war into a clandestine affair.

Edward knows what the Colonel's pillows smell like now, but on field missions he still has to wave his pocket watch in people's faces to stop them from calling him a child.

I'm not a child, Edward thinks as he stifles his moans and cries in those same pillows, listening as Mustang slaves on top of him, growls C'mon, c'mon, and holds him down by the nape of his neck.

The man had raised an obedient dog, only to realize that he wanted a feral wolf instead, one that bit his hand whenever he tried to reach out. Somewhere along the way, however, they have both turned into stray mutts, fucking in the street.

Edward howls when he comes.

 

“I wish,” the Colonel whispers into his hair when it is already dark outside and for once Edward has not fled with the last light of day, “I wish...”

“What?” Edward asks and blearily blinks up to him.

“I wish I knew how not to break us,” Mustang says, sounding somewhat broken indeed.

But Edward falls asleep in the Colonel's bed, the Colonel's arms, and doesn't quite see what the difference would have been.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He wakes with sleep still thick on his tongue and his mind weighted down by fantasies.

“Fullmetal,” Mustang says curtly and shakes him by the shoulder, “Wake up.”

This would have been the difference, Edward realizes and stretches up to kiss him, kiss him because he has never done so before. Yet Mustang doesn't kiss back, just stares and stares and doesn't react.

With a harsh inhale, Ed becomes aware of their surroundings, that they are in Mustang's office instead of his bedroom, that they are fully dressed and Ed is wearing defiant red instead of military blue.

It must have been a dream then. All of it, and then some.

But now Edward knows what Mustang's lips feel like in reality.

“You must have hit your head on the mission,” the Colonel offers him an easy way out.

“I haven't,” Ed objects because after all the muddled confusion he feels like he is finally thinking clearly.

“You should go see a doctor anyway,” Mustang advises, taking a step back, but not enough to hide behind his desk once more.

“You still need my report,” Ed reminds him, pushing himself up from the couch that he could swear he had surrendered his virginity on.

Mustang's eyes follow him towards the door. They are still dark but they do not seem nearly as dangerous as before.

“... Then maybe, if the doctor clears you, you can come back later,” he says, fingers haphazardly dancing across the documents on the desk at his back.

“Don't think I won't,” Edwards says and, just for the hell of it, adds, “Bastard.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> It is done. Why do I keep going from fucked up dub-con to potential romance? I don't even wanna know.  
> But you read it, so if you enjoyed it please let me know! :)


End file.
